From 9 to 20 November, Dinna Bjørn, one of the leading experts on the repertoire of Danish master choreographer August Bournonville, gave a Bournonville workshop to students of the National Ballet Academy. She taught all the students of the pre-professional programme L’École de Danse, the famous and demanding divertissement from Bournonville’s ballet Le Conservatoire. Bjørn will return at the end of June to take the final rehearsals for the end-of-year performances Dansers van Morgen. Immediately following that, the complete Danish Bournonville faculty will be joining her in giving an intensive ‘Bournonville Week’ during the Amsterdam International Summer School organised by the National Ballet Academy.

Dinna Bjørn danced with the Royal Danish Ballet from 1964 to 1985, most of the time as a principal. She became thoroughly acquainted with the repertoire of August Bournonville (1805-1879), including Le Conservatoire. ‘Bournonville created it in 1849, at the end of his career as a dancer. The choreography is actually a tribute to his youth and to the days when he was training as a dancer at the Conservatoire de Paris. The nice thing is that although he had already developed his own style in 1849, the piece also contains a lot of the pure French ballet style, of which hardly anything has survived apart from in this ballet’.
The most famous and most frequently performed section of Le Conservatoire is L’École de Danse, a plotless divertissement situated in a ballet studio, which – because it has no storyline – gave Bournonville plenty of scope for displaying his extremely delicate style, full of light jumps, fast footwork and graceful ports de bras (arm movements), in its purest form.
Bjørn: ‘However much we believe nowadays that ballet technique is continually improving, L’École de Danse is extremely demanding for today’s dancers as well. The girls have to jump much more than they are used to, and the boys are particularly challenged by the soft, flowing movements of the upper body and arms. Unlike their usual practice, they have to involve the audience in their performance, as it were, rather than presenting themselves. And equally important is the fact that it should all look like it is costing them no effort whatsoever. Bournonville is known for his very natural, elegant style of dancing’.

Giving something for later
Bjørn (68) has been working as a Bournonville repetiteur with leading ballet companies for 27 years now. Working with a ballet academy is totally different, she says. ‘With a company, you are completely focused on the result and the deadline: on that particular date, the ballet has to ‘go on’. At school, you are much more concerned with education. You want to give the students something for later. So you involve as many of them as possible in the rehearsals. In Amsterdam, I’ve worked with all the students on the pre-professional programme – nearly forty of them’. And she’s very enthusiastic about them. ‘Not only about their high standard, but also their dedication, attention and openness. We learned the whole piece in just four days. So that left enough time to work on the details. And that’s the most important thing: to have the time to let the students see and experience what makes Bournonville so different to the Russian or Italian ballet style, or to the ballet of today’.